A comprehensive account of how British race patriotism shaped the defense partnership between Britain and the dominions before the Great War.

This is an important study that should be read by all interested in British imperial defense and grand strategy Knitting together the empire was a class of men, a body of opinion, a 'defence community of military, naval and colonial officials drawn together by a common belief that the empire was in such a poor state of defence as to present a standing temptation to an enemy. They also limited confidence in the ability of a post-1867 democracy to conduct an effective defence, foreign or imperial policy. The roots of these beliefs lay in their common experience in the empire, in war and in the several defence investigations and war scares that occurred between the Crimean War and the Balkan Crisis of 1878.

This book explores how and why Scottish Highlanders, Punjabi Sikhs, and Nepalese Gurkhas became identified as the British Empire’s fiercest, most manly soldiers in nineteenth century discourse. As ‘martial races’ these men were believed to possess a biological or cultural disposition to the racial and masculine qualities necessary for the arts of war. Because of this, they were used as icons to promote recruitment in British and Indian armies - a phenomenon with important social and political effects in India, in Britain, and in the armies of the Empire. Martial Races bridges regional studies of South Asia and Britain while straddling the fields of racial theory, masculinity, imperialism, identity politics, and military studies. Of particular importance is the way it exposes the historical instability of racial categories based on colour and its insistence that historically specific ideologies of masculinity helped form the logic of imperial defence, thus wedding gender theory with military studies in unique ways. Moreover, Martial Races challenges the marginalisation of the British Army in histories of Victorian popular culture, and demonstrates the army’s enduring impact on the regional cultures of the Highlands, the Punjab and Nepal. This unique study will make fascinating reading for higher level students and experts in imperial history, military history and gender history.

In 1902, the British government concluded a defensive alliance with Japan, a state that had surprised much of the world with its sudden rise to prominence. For the next two decades, the Anglo-Japanese alliance would hold the balance of power in East Asia, shielding Japan as it cemented its regional position, and allowing Britain to concentrate on meeting the German challenge in Europe. Yet it was also a relationship shaped by its contradictions. Empire Ascendant examines how officials and commentators across the British imperial system wrestled with the implications of Japan's unique status as an Asian power in an international order dominated by European colonial empires. On the settlement frontiers of Australasia and North America, white colonial elites formulated their own responses to the growth of Japan's power, charged by the twinned forces of colonial nationalism and racial anxiety, as they designed immigration laws to exclude Japanese migrants, developed autonomous military and naval forces, and pressed Britain to rally behind their vision of a 'white empire'. Yet at the same time, the alliance legitimised Japan's participation in great-power diplomacy, and worked to counteract racist notions of a 'yellow peril'. By the late 1900s, Japan stood at the centre of a series of escalating inter-imperial disputes over foreign policy, defence, migration, and ultimately, over the future of the British imperial system itself. This account weaves together studies of diplomacy, strategy, and imperial relations to pose searching questions about how Japan's entry into the 'family of civilised nations' shaped, and was shaped by, ideologies of race.

From the late 1800s to the early 1900s, Australian settler colonists mobilised their unique settler experiences to develop their own vision of what ‘empire’ was and could be. Reinterpreting their histories and attempting to divine their futures with a much heavier concentration on racialized visions of humanity, white Australian settlers came to believe that their whiteness as well as their Britishness qualified them for an equal voice in the running of Britain’s imperial project. Through asserting their case, many soon claimed that, as newly minted citizens of a progressive and exemplary Australian Commonwealth, white settlers such as themselves were actually better suited to the modern task of empire. Such a settler political cosmology with empire at its center ultimately led Australians to claim an empire of their own in the Pacific Islands, complete with its own, unique imperial governmentality.

In the first and only examination of how the British Empire and Commonwealth sustained its soldiers before, during, and after both world wars, a cast of leading military historians explores how the empire mobilized manpower to recruit workers, care for veterans, and transform factory workers and farmers into riflemen. Raising armies is more than counting people, putting them in uniform, and assigning them to formations. It demands efficient measures for recruitment, registration, and assignment. It requires processes for transforming common people into soldiers and then producing officers, staffs, and commanders to lead them. It necessitates balancing the needs of the armed services with industry and agriculture. And, often overlooked but illuminated incisively here, raising armies relies on medical services for mending wounded soldiers and programs and pensions to look after them when demobilized. Manpower and the Armies of the British Empire in the Two World Wars is a transnational look at how the empire did not always get these things right. But through trial, error, analysis, and introspection, it levied the large armies needed to prosecute both wars. Contributors Paul R. Bartrop, Charles Booth, Jean Bou, Daniel Byers, Kent Fedorowich, Jonathan Fennell, Meghan Fitzpatrick, Richard S. Grayson, Ian McGibbon, Jessica Meyer, Emma Newlands, Kaushik Roy, Roger Sarty, Gary Sheffield, Ian van der Waag